DAVID ADJAYE

Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning, I leave my house on Osbaldeston Road in Stoke Newington N–16, turn right, then left down Casenove Road, past the Rabbi School and the Gujarati Muslim Centre, past the bearded Hassidic patriarchs, heads bent in conversation, past the Muslim youth talking about the new Nokia 770 to Stoke Newington High Street, where I enter the empty station, descend the stairs to take the 9:15am overground train to Whitechapel. I exit right, walk under the tunnel, bear right across the concrete playground with the red diagonal sculptures, and keep going until I reach Whitechapel High Street.

There I turn right again and enter Whitechapel tube; bound for platform 5 East London Line to New Cross for Goldsmiths College. This route, by sheer luck, has allowed me to witness the inauguration of David Adjaye’s Whitechapel Idea Store. For a long while, I became a human steadicam, staring at the partial volume of the West façade, the laminated green and blue glass panels that picked up, amplified, and projected the striped canopies of the High Street market stalls. Over time it became clear that the Idea Store was, and is, a very peculiar building; in fact it was nothing less than a new building type for London, a five storey block of libraries and classrooms, a crèche, a dance studio, and a cafe whose nearest relative might be Toyo Ito’s Mediatheque in Sendai, Japan.

What struck me, and what continues to provoke, was how quickly this new structure infiltrated itself into the Muslim vernacular of High Street. David Adjaye had designed an event that could contribute to the defiantly parochial complexity of everyday life. Adjaye’s singularity lies here: in creating spaces that allow for an engagement with the sociality of the urban, his buildings do not repair or rescue or regenerate publicness; rather, they find ways to infiltrate the condition of publicness with potentiality.

“I am optimistic about the futures of some of the very youngest designers precisely because they are palpably pessimistic about the future at large.”

TROY PATTERSON on New York Fashion Week, covering “clothes designed for Doomsday, with survivalist vibes and Mad Max leisurewear,” Thom Browne’s Hitchcockian “uniforms for a conformist dystopia,” and a 71-person vocal ensemble called the Pyer Moss Tabernacle Drip Choir Drenched in the Blood.

Half a century before the latest protests at the Whitney Museum of Art, Faith Ringgold was there, in front of the museum alongside other activists demanding equitable representation of women and black artists in the institution’s exhibitions. As a painter she was influenced, as the European modernists she studied in college were, by the masks she saw while traveling in Africa in the 1970s. But she would never wear a mask herself. MoreSeptember 6, 2019

Apparently, a SpaceX Internet satellite almost hit a European spacecraft on Monday.

🛰🚀

“As companies and government agencies launch more spacecraft, concerns are growing about the likelihood of a ‘Kessler syndrome’ event: a cascading series of orbital collisions that may curtail human access to space for hundreds of years,” reports Business Insider.

HAVE LOGOS DILUTED LUXURY ?

“Scarcity is a fascinating phenomenon because it flies in the face of traditional economics and its supply-and-demand paradigm. And while scarcity has traditionally been the provenance of luxury, clever streetwear brands like Supreme and Palace have figured out that it can work at any price point. If you add scarcity to an already-hyped product, its desirability goes through the roof, and so does your reputation for being the coolest brand around. And if you keep the prices low enough to make it affordable in theory, you don’t alienate people.” Read more on Highsnobiety 👜💅

"Social media and society have something to do with the public square and having conversations and shared spaces. This project is a bit more running out into that space and shouting something out then running away. It's definitely a public statement, but there's no conversation really." Richard Turley and Lucas Mascatello on the possibility of intimacy in the New York-themed broadsheet CIVILIZATION. MoreSeptember 4, 2019

Why does the far right love Fred Perry?

“The transformation in aesthetics and style is part of a deliberate, top-down tactic on the part of the far right to appear more mainstream in order to make the public more receptive to their ideas. This shift normalises and disrupts the public’s ideas about what extremists look like and makes it harder to interpret and recognise the far right’s ideas as extreme.” Read more in THE GUARDIAN.

How Sustainability Became a Luxury Value:

“As soon as sustainability became something that consumers could dream of caring about—something rare and expensive—it ironically had more appeal. Fashion, as any truly modern designer knows, is as much about branding and marketing as it is about clothes. And as long as there’s an audience for fashion, any properly sustainable strategy will require making ethically designed and produced clothes that are cooler than anything else you can buy.”